Federal Law Now Says Kids Can Walk To School Alone (fastcoexist.com)

An anonymous reader writes: There's some good news for "free-range" parents and fans of children being allowed to walk places on their own. A recently approved federal education law will allow students to take alternative forms of transportation to and from school with parental permission. Fastcoexist reports: "Relax, parents. Now you can allow your kids to walk, ride a bike, or take a bus to school, without you or your children getting arrested. The recently-signed Every Student Succeeds Act contains a section (858) that protects the rights of kids to walk or go out alone. The act was sponsored by Utah senator Mike Lee, who is a supporter of the Free Range Kids movement, and provides some hope for parents who feel that their kids should be allowed some autonomy to get by own their own." One can only hope that children will be allowed to go to the park on their own soon as well.

Comments

This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Land of the free my ass. It's a nation of lunatics ruled by fear.

Re:This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[hey!]

I think of this situation as being in part like the hygiene hypothesis for the rise in allergies: without the level of exposure to infectious microorganisms that would have been normal throughout most of human evolution, our immune systems go haywire. It is now so safe for children our normal protective instincts go haywire. Back when kids routinely worked in textile mills or as powder monkeys in mines nobody's eyebrows would have been raised by some kid walking a few miles to school. Now that kids are very safe indeed bad things that happen to them walking down a well-traveled street in broad daylight are a relatively greater fraction of the overall risk, even though that risk is very, very small.

Then there's the way that our information filters affect our perceptions of risk. Take school shootings; in the three years since Sandy Hook, 555 children 12 or under have been killed by firearms in the US; but as shocking as that is, you have to put it context; there are roughly 29 million children 14 and under in the US. In comparison about 2600 babies die each year from low birth weight; while in a global context the US infant mortality rate is relatively low, compared to similar wealthy countries it is shockingly high, which suggests that man of these deaths are preventable. Likewise the comparable number of children who die from influenza and pneumonia in that period isn't on the radar screen because it isn't news when a child dies from a commonplace but largely preventable infection. In 2014 there were 32,000 cases of whooping cough in the US leading to 20 deaths, and pertussis is an entirely eradicable disease.

Don't get me wrong; insofar as school shootings are preventable by practical steps we should take those steps; but we ought to prioritize causes of mortality and injury based on hard data, not our information filters.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[blogagog]

"there's no old law that forbids it,"

That's the saddest part. There now has to be a law that 'allows' something.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[bitingduck]

And in the United States in the early 1970s I did similar things. Crime was WAY worse then than now. But nobody thought anything of it.

We have become insane.

Yes. I walked to school with a couple other 6 year olds in 1st grade in the 70's. It's lightspeed peer to peer communication that's made us insane. Every bad thing that happens anywhere to anyone gets bumped up to national news so it seems like it's all in your backyard and around every corner.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[Ol Olsoc]

And in the United States in the early 1970s I did similar things. Crime was WAY worse then than now. But nobody thought anything of it. We have become insane.

And how!

Safety culture meets helicopter parents meets attachment parenting meets irrational fear equals this batshit insanity.

And the concept of no child unsupervised needs to die. These people are damaging their children with well meaning but irrational hovering, over supervision, and the fear that the second they aren't watching the child, Jerry Sandusky will show up.

Law and Order : Special Victims Unit is a fictional Television show, not a documentary, folks!

Even back in the 90's, when this helicoptering crap was getting started, my son and his friends played street hockey, in the streets!

Let's wait a minute for all the people to revive from their faint....

Okay, everyone back? If anyone needs a Xanax take a couple. We discretely kept an eye on them, but let them alone. Squabbles? Check. Silliness? Check. Learning how to get along with others to resolve issues? Check. Learning that there were some statements that were not to be ignored? (CAR!) Check.

What was impressive to watch was how kids figured all this stuff out. Nothing turned into "Lord of the Flies". These children were leaning valuable social skills, getting exercise, and having fun.

The reason this part of the law was enabled is because safety culture has entered the stage of failing. Protecting children by taking away normal loving parents is not protecting them, its doing grave damage to them in the name safety.

Because we now have to protect ourselves from safety culture.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[AthanasiusKircher]

The boy, Lucan, decided to walk to school on his own, two miles away, and was about halfway there when a business owner spotted him and called the cops.

This is something often not pointed out -- yes, police sometimes choose to intervene in such cases on their own. But very frequently they only take these actions because some neighborhood busybody calls the cops -- who then feel they need to take action.

I remember reading about this story back when it happened, and the business owner may have had a legitimate concern about how busy the streets were on the kid's route.

But the important thing is to compare the reaction to that situation a few decades ago. Fifty years ago if a local business owner noticed something like that, he'd go out and ask the kid where he was going. And then he'd offer to call the parent if he thought it was dangerous. And if the parent didn't answer, he might call the local policeman and ask if they could drive the kid, who would just do so without making a big deal. Or the business owner might even offer to close up his shop for five minutes and drive the kid the rest of the way to school himself.

These days if a business owner did the latter, the kid would likely start screaming "pedophile! offered me a ride in his car!" and the business owner would have ended up in jail along with the mom. Heck, somebody else might even think it suspicious if he went outside to ask the kid whether the kid was all right -- "unknown man approaching a child," some other passersby might think... and then THEY would call the cops on the man.

So, he did the only thing an adult male can do in the U.S. when he sees an unaccompanied child and is concerned -- he called the police without even approaching the kid and asking the kid about the situation. Instead of a reasonable community reaction to help a kid get to school, hysteria causes everyone to act in unreasonable ways.